A green Brown success?
When history comes to review the Brown government, it has every chance of proving an unhappy event. Gordon Brown’s takeover from Tony Blair settled uneasily into a sad and dispossessed period of ‘readjustment’ to the global financial catastrophe.
But one of history’s other asides in reviewing the Brown government may yet come to rest on the works of Lord Adonis. Who? You may ask. Adonis is a rare creature – a minister who’s ended up running a department responsible for one of his lifelong passions – the railways.
When I was a child, the M1 motorway was being built and opened under the leadership of an unremarkable Tory minister of transport by the name of Ernest Marples.
Marples was a scion of the family that gave its name to a then very large construction company called Marples Ridgeway… which did what? Why, it built roads. Marples therefore had some interest in seeing the growth in Britain’s then revolutionary motorway road system.
Adonis has no such pecuniary interest; his passion seems to come from his brain and his heart. Hence today’s dramatic, even romantic, announcement that our treasured railways are to see a major environmentally friendly upgrade – the electrification of the London Swansea mainline with spurs to Bristol and Oxford.
As a former student at Liverpool University, I’m obviously excited to see the Liverpool-Manchester line included in the electrification plans (the journey will be cut from 45 to 30 minutes).
Now all he has to do is make an even bigger decision – where to go ahead with a completely new ultra high speed north south line to connect with both the Swansea line and the European network.
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i feel sorry for brown, he inherited a whole load of mess from blair’s supremist reign,and the americans are responsable for the global financial problems from what i can gather not brown. as for the modernisation of the rail network i have mixed feelings, it is good as our rail network is years behind other european countries, so thats a good thing , but look at the cost, i suppose the taxpayer is going to fund the billions it will cost, and then when completed in 8 years the fares are going to double, probably about £170.00 to get from cardiff to london. so is it really a good thing.
At the end of the day Brown is a hard working conviction politician, which is something you cannot say for Cameron.
I know who I would rather trust.
Brown’s problems are that he has zero charisma, the press have it in for him, half of his own party have it in for him and he has been forced to do unpleasent things like bring Mandelson back in to the government.
I feel sorry for the bloke. Saving the banks was the right thing to do, regardless of what anyone else says. If people had woken up one day to find a large portion of their money, their business’s money or their employer’s money no longer existed, the country would have erupted in violence make no mistake.
People can try and blame the government for the recession, but at the end of the day it was the banks who actually did the damage.
Labour basically have no hope in the next election, but I’m not sure history will look upon Brown unfavourably. When the time came for action over the failing banking system, he did what needed to be done, and he was the first world leader to get it right (the rest soon followed).
Dartford (in the 21st Century) has been without electricity for 4 days due to cable damage ?
Sounds like a catastrophy waiting to happen if we become ever more dependent on electric.
When are privately owned companies able to demand taxpayer bail-out year on year while chairmen and directors pay
themselves huge salaries? ANSWER—-
When they are railway companies.How
can this be justified,am i the only one
who thinks this way??
I feel such sorrow for Gordon Brown…But, what you are saying about a “GREEN” Success is hearsay….
=Dennis Junior=